September 09, 2007

Chapter 2 Youth

"Lionel English was my college roommate.
We met in Spencer Hall the first day of freshman year. My first impression was that he was shy and
small, but good-natured. When he introduced himself as 'Lionel,' I asked
if I could call him 'Lenny' for short; he agreed, and that became his college
nickname for the next four years. We shook hands and agreed on sleeping
arrangements.

“He took an interest in me out of politeness and
made small talk. He seemed to want to be friends. I didn't mind. I found out that he was
the son of a local businessman, the owner of a medium-sized building-supplies
firm that did business throughout southern Indiana and Illinois. He hadn't yet
decided between majoring in science and business.

“I told him my mother was a secretary and my
father was a bum. I said it without
embarrassment but he seemed a little embarrassed.

"Then I saw that there was a chessboard among
his things. 'Do you play?' I asked. Sure, he said, and challenged
me to a game. He seemed to expect to win. But his play was too
cautious and a little too… direct. He didn’t use daring tactics
himself, and he wasn’t prepared for my surprise attack. I won the first
game, and the second game.

" 'You're pretty good,' he said.

“I told him about how I'd played my grandfather
and my father when I was a kid, and they'd taught me all their tricks.

"That was the first of dozens, maybe hundreds
of chess games that Lenny and I played over the next three years. Of
those, he won maybe five or six. Yet I think that every single game we
played was at his suggestion. That was the odd thing about Lenny: he
wanted to win, in fact I think he wanted it very badly, yet losing never
discouraged him. He kept trying. He was the same way, I would soon
learn, when it came to love.

"To my surprise, Lenny and I became best
friends. We were very different: different in our approach to school,
our approach to girls, our approach to life. I remember how much he
wanted to succeed his father in running the family business, and how afraid he
was that he wouldn’t live up to it. I couldn't relate to that. Still, I always found it easy to talk to
him. He never judged you, never thought what you said was stupid. It was because Lenny was so loyal and
affectionate that we became friends. In fact, he seemed to regard us as
close friends from the very beginning, well before I got used to the idea.

“My mother liked me being friends with Lenny.
After high school, my friends had mostly joined the army. I had wanted to
join the army too. I went to college for
Mom’s sake, but I wasn’t sure if wanted to stay. When my mom met Lenny, she
thought he was just the kind of friend she wanted me to make in college—a ‘good
influence.’ I think I made friends with
him partly to please her. My mom had
worked as a secretary for thirty years and had always been the breadwinner of
the family. She got us through the
Depression. She was from a small town in
eastern Kentucky, and moved to
this town in 1917 without knowing a soul in it, just because a traveler had
said there were jobs here. A year later
my father came home from World War I in uniform, with a chest full of military
decorations. She fell in love with the
local hero, along with half the town, and when she married him a few months
later I think she thought she was the luckiest girl alive. But the military parades had gone to his
head. He wouldn’t take orders from
bosses and kept losing jobs. Or he’d try
to go into business for himself. He got
drunk a lot, sometimes rowdy. Soon she
had to learn to hide money from him, so he wouldn’t spend it on booze or
get-rich-quick schemes. That caused
tension. He got violent with her only
once or twice, I think, but the distrust never healed. My brother was born in 1922, born restless. He ran away at fifteen, enlisted when the war
came, and died on the beaches at Normandy. I grew up knowing that I was all she had to
show for her hard, sad life, and feeling guilty for not loving her the way she
deserved. I liked my father better,
though I knew I shouldn’t. The chain of
failures that was his life hadn’t dimmed the easy-going charisma, the jolly
bravado that had made the crowds love to cheer for him long ago. If being friends with Lenny could help me
repay a little of my debt to my mother, that was reason enough. But it wasn’t just that. Like I said, he was easy to talk to.

"I remember the first time I saw Mary
Graber. On a warm September afternoon in 1945, I walked past a hillside
where a girl was lying asleep in the grass beneath apple trees, with a book in
her hand. A thin blue and white cotton dress lay across her ankles.
Her feet were bare. She seemed to have fallen asleep
unintentionally. I approached her, quiet as a hunter,
till I was almost standing over her. A breeze moved the trees and the
shadows of leaves danced across her, across the folds of the dress that lay
loosely on her legs, across her breasts caressed by soft fabric, across her
dreamlike face. It was the serenity of her face that completed the scene,
a serenity that knew no fear or regret, as humble as the earth, as free as the
sky. I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t want to disturb the scene. Finally I walked away.

“A little while later, I discovered that the word
'innocence' had, in my mind, become indelibly associated with an image: a
Sleeping Beauty, dreaming on the grassy hillside in the slanting September sun,
as the apple's leaves whispered overhead, a book hanging limp and forgotten in her hand to symbolize the irrelevance of wisdom to happiness.

“Not long afterwards, Lionel
English fell in love. For weeks, he
could talk of nothing but ‘Mary Mary Mary,’ and in a very foolish fashion. He was fascinated by every bit of gossip
about her that he could discover, trying to learn about her, yet it did him
little good, because he would see in her only an Ideal. He was like a philosopher compulsively
working out a vast theory of man and virtue and history and love and
everything, the central axiom of which was the perfection of Mary. I was curious to meet ‘Mary’, but that was
not easy to arrange, for Lionel didn’t actually know her. Glimpses from afar and one brief and
accidental conversation had been enough. But one day he managed to point her out to me walking across the quad,
and who do you think it was? None other
than my Sleeping Beauty! I never told
him about the afternoon that I saw her asleep beneath the apple trees. The last thing he needed was more fuel on the
fire of his passion.

“Lionel was horrified when I
suggested that he confess to her how he felt. He wanted to make himself worthy of her, somehow, to achieve something
noble or notable. In the meantime it
would be impossible presumption to make a confession. Instead, he operated through stratagems. He tried to do the same activities, take the
same classes and sit next to her, to eat lunch at the same time, frequent the
same places in the library, all so that they would ‘happen’ to see each other a
lot and become friends. He told me all
these details. I laughed at him. But it worked. By the end of freshman year, Lionel had
become not only a friend, but one of Mary’s closest confidants.

“There was more than a year when
they ate lunch together and took classes together and talked, she confiding in
him, he holding onto his secret. My
amusement turned to exasperation. Then
suddenly, she had a love affair with another man, while Lionel was still ‘just
a friend.’ She talked to him about it,
of her feelings, her hopes, her quarrel with her father about him, even
treating him to lovesick ramblings a bit like those I had had to listen to from
Lionel for two years. I felt sorry for Lionel. He was her friend, and he loved her, and
wanted her to be happy, and she was
happy, and he was irrelevant to her happiness. I think there were nights when, if he had had the power, he would have
wished himself out of existence, deleted himself from the universe, melted away
into the darkness.

“Then Lionel’s luck changed. Mary’s lover went away to a distant country,
leaving her heartbroken, and Lionel was the one she turned to for comfort. Finally he asked her if they could be more
than friends, and she accepted. He went
to Illinois to meet her family
and her father liked Lionel much better than the previous suitor. The first night he kissed her he came home in
a daze. He thought he had been taken up
to heaven, and was afraid of waking up from a dream. They were a beautiful couple. It may have been gratitude more than love
that first drew her to him, but her gratitude seemed to turn to love in
response to his, as the waters of a lake reflect the blue of the sky. They got engaged at Christmastime and married
in May, just before graduation.

“I was the best man at Lionel’s
wedding, and I looked handsome! I gave a
grand speech in honor of Lionel and his great, chivalrous, romantic love for
Mary, and not only grand, but heartfelt, and hilarious. I looked and spoke so well that I upstaged
the groom. I had my father’s charisma, and
four years of college and of friendship with Lionel made me respectable, so I
was quite the eligible bachelor. As I
made the rounds, shaking hands with the Lionel’s father’s business associates
and their wives, I could see the mothers scheming for me on behalf of their
daughters. I was determined not to be
had. It was the instinct of the hare to
escape the trap. But there was more than
that to the restlessness I felt that day. Even while I was shaking hands and smiling and basking in glory, a part
of me looked around at the ceremonial happiness of the occasion and it felt
alien. What had for months been the
bittersweet taste of a friend’s success was now something else: wanderlust,
calling to me like a far-off train whistle at first, then growing stronger,
rumbling down the tracks of time like thunder, its metal hands whirling its
wheels as it charged relentlessly onward. By the time the wedding guests adjourned, the best man smiling in his
tuxedo was a shell. My thoughts were far
away.

“A week later they gave me my
papers and I was a free man. I went down
to Atlanta, Georgia,
where my uncle had a garage and wanted help. I didn’t know much about cars but I learned fast. My aunt took an enormous liking to me and
used to buy me expensive presents, to my uncle’s annoyance—I seemed to be able
to charm everyone back then. I worked
there a year, saving the money my uncle paid me, first for a truck of my own,
then to travel. By spring I had a pretty
good stash, so I quit the job at my uncle’s garage and set out on the road with
no destination. As I drove east along
the back roads—this was before the interstate highways, so the country seemed
bigger and more unexplored—I had no future and no past. There was only the cottages and the fields,
and then the mountains and the forests and the road and the sky. When I got tired, I slept under the stars in
the back of the truck. I woke in the
magic hours of dawn, the east ablaze with pink clouds. I felt as if I had never before in my life
been really awake.

“As the road ran past some
farmhouses in the afternoon I passed a girl walking along the side of the
road. I stopped, said hi, asked her
name. ‘Elizabeth—Eliza,’
she said. A deep Southern accent, not
the kind I’d heard in Atlanta, a
sing-song mountain speech. Since then,
radio and TV have erased them, but there used to be a thousand accents in the
South, a little different in every village and hamlet. Yet her features were unusual for those
parts: long black hair, and a slightly dark complexion. I asked her what the nearest town was. It was called Boligee, an Indian name, five
miles down the road. Then I asked what
state I was in. Tennesee. I asked her if she needed a ride. She got in, and I hoped it would be a long
way. I started telling her how much I
admired the mountains, and how I had left Georgia
because I wanted to travel, and that I didn’t know where I was going, and how I
was amazed at how big and beautiful the world was. She listened, then said, as if it were an
apology, that she’d lived there her whole life. We talked haltingly until we got to the farmhouse where she lived. I got out and stood by the truck. She apologized for not inviting me in, but she
was afraid of what her father would think. We paused, looking for a pretext for her not to go in.

“‘You look beautiful…’ I said, in
a tone as if it were part of a phrase like ‘You look beautiful in that dress,’
only I didn’t add ‘in that dress.’ Then
I said, ‘You are beautiful.’ We looked at each other for a few moments,
and then I said, ‘I think I’ll stop in Boligee and look for work. Will you come to see me?’

“‘Sure, I’ll come,’ she said.

“I don’t tell lies often—honesty
is my one virtue—but I told one in Boligee. I said that I knew how to fix tractors. Mechanic was the only trade I had, and there was only one mechanic in
Boligee, Mr. Botts, and most of his business was tractors. He believed me, hired me and set me to work
right away. I was nervous as hell when
he showed me that first machine, but I played cool and confident—the best
acting I’ve ever done. When he stepped
out of the garage to tend the counter I pored desperately over it. My mind has never worked so fast. I tried to memorize every moving part, and
piece together in my mind how the whole thing worked. I could have made bad mistakes on those first
few jobs, could have taken something apart that I didn’t know how to put back
together, but I guess I got lucky. Pretty soon the lie was true, and I did know how to fix tractors. I told the boss I didn’t have a place to
stay, and he offered me a cot that I could put in the garage until I found
something better. That arrangement
suited me just fine, for what need did I have for worldly comfort when I had
the memory of Eliza’s face?

“For two weeks I waited to see
that face, to see it in the flesh I mean, for I saw it every waking moment in
my mind, as real as the sun. Indeed, the
world lost its reality next to her, for people and rooms and streets and night
and day came and went, but her beautiful face was always there, not a memory,
but a promise, a foreshadowing. I no
more doubted in her promise than a Jesuit doubts the church. Then one afternoon her face appeared, bold
yet shy, in the doorway. I called her
name and ran to her. But I didn’t
embrace her, didn’t touch her: her face said not yet. We made some stupid
chatter without listening to ourselves to fool Mr. Botts. But it was a working day and I said I had to
stay till 5:30, and could she
wait?

“After work I found her, as we had
planned, in the aisles of the general store. We walked to the place where she had tethered her tall black horse. I told her about my job and the cot in the
garage, which meant: I can stay. There’s
no need for us to be parted. Also I
talked to put her at ease, for she seemed terribly shy, and fearful that she
would bore me. The town was ringed with
green mountains, and the afternoon hung heavy in the air. She asked if I wanted to ride to the top of Mt. Lewis. I mounted first—I had been on a horse only a
few times before that—and as she mounted behind me, she touched me for the
first time, and I felt with wonder her arms around my waist, and her nipples
touch my back through her shirt.

“We were on the edge of a mighty
forest now, and soon we were in its midst. The canopy was full of insect music, punctuated with bird calls, but the
trees were silent. We rode for hours, I
think. Sometimes the trees broke and we
looked out over ever-widening vistas of the green Tennessee landscape—and then the dim sanctuary stillness of the forest enfolded us
again. On the summit, we finally broke
the silence and I whispered to her some tribute to the beauty of the
place. We watched the sunset there, without
a thought for the time or for the journey home in the dark. The sky blazed in the west, and then
dimmed. By the time we reached the town
beneath a star-strewn sky the town was silent. We were alone in the universe.

“‘I love you,’ I told her. ‘I want to see you as much as I can. Will you come tomorrow?’

“She assented, not without some
reluctance. It was not, as I learned
later but as I could sense even then, easy for her to get away from home, and
yet she did it again and again, not every day but oftener than not, for two
months. There were no movie theaters in
Boligee, so usually we went riding, sometimes in my truck, sometimes on her
horse. Sometimes we swam in the
creeks. Sometimes we listened to my
radio. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we
didn’t. She was always fearful, fearful
of what the people in the town would think and say, fearful that her father
would find out, fearful that I would vanish as suddenly and unaccountably as I
had appeared. But when I took
liberties—when I embraced her, when I kissed her—she gave me everything. It was when I kissed her for the first time
that she told me she loved me. Her love
was stronger than her fear.

“One day she came to me with a
bruised face. She said we needed to
talk. Can we talk over dinner, I asked,
so we went to the one diner in Boligee and got a table. What is it, I asked. ‘Daddy found out about us. He says I can’t see you anymore,’ she
said. ‘He says that his daughter will
never marry a Yankee.’ He hated Yankees
because his granddad had fought in the Civil War. That was why we never met at her house. I said nothing. ‘Daddy says I can’t see you anymore,’ she
said again, and burst into tears.

“Why did I accept that? I answered with some question, as if more
information was needed, she cried more and I tried to comfort her, then she
said ‘I’m sorry,’ and suddenly left—but memory obscures what happened,
except that there was no proper goodbye. I followed after her but only from a distance, not knowing what more to
say, watched her mount her horse, and walked home, stunned. But why didn’t I appeal to her love and ask
her to leave her father and come with me? I think now that she was asking me to, even if she didn’t know it. But my mind balked at the words ‘marry a
Yankee.’ The word ‘marry’ had never been
spoken between us till that moment. I
hadn’t acknowledged to myself that that was where all our love-talk
pointed. I was Romeo on the surface, but
within there was an accountant, counting up the money that Mr. Botts paid me
and I’d stashed in a metal box under my cot—my thirty pieces of silver—calculating
the gasoline it would buy, the miles it would carry me down the highway. Inside me, the ghost train of restlessness
was still there, rattling and rumbling and roaring on into the night.

“I doubt I could tell you all the
places I lived. I looked for work in Nashville,
found it in Baton Rouge. There was a place in Arkansas,
and one in Oklahoma. I stayed with a friend in New Orleans for a few months, then went west again. I worked for a while in west Texas
with an old-fashioned wildcatter, out in the desert where there’s no trees
between a man and the sky, and the eye can scan the horizon. He decided I was bad luck after a while and
maybe he was right because he struck oil a little while later. By that time, I’d made it to California. I thought it was the best place on earth: the
orange groves, the low dry mountains, the palm trees, the flowers, the sun and
the sea. I got a job in real
estate. They took the hills and covered
them with sad, square houses, and I sold them.

“I dated a Hollywood girl for a couple of years. She was from
Minnesota, and she had looked in
the mirror when she was eighteen and decided she had what it takes to be a
star. She took a bus to California
and went to the movie studios and did anything she could, first sweeping
floors, then bit parts. She was hot, and I felt like a king walking down
Melrose Avenue with her on
my arm. We were living the myth. But I knew she didn’t have talent. Not enough to make it. She told me the Hollywood gossip. I listened to her fume about
directors, obsess about callbacks, plan her breakthrough. I nursed her through the bad times, the times
when she glimpsed the truth. I was glad
when they passed. Her moods, her myth
were the price I paid for her, and it got to be too high. I stopped putting up with them, and she broke
up with me. By that time, I was doing
pretty well for myself selling houses. The secretaries took orders from me now, and I started noticing how young they were. Before, I
had been the young one. And then I
realized that I didn’t hear the ghost train in my mind anymore. I wasn’t restless anymore, I was lonely.

“Only two people had kept track of
my changing addresses all this time. One
was my mother. The other was Lionel
English. There was something feminine
about the faithfulness of his correspondence. He wanted to know everything, he went out of his way to empathize with
every fragment of news I sent, he gave me thorough reports from the home town,
not only about himself but about the people we knew, and he told me I was
missed and pleaded with me to come home or at least to visit. It was hard to tell Lionel’s letters from my
mother’s except that his were so informative. From his letters, I knew that he and Mary had a son, David, who turned
two, five, seven, eight, nine years old; that Lionel was working for his
father, then that his father had retired, and that the firm was doing better
than ever; and later, that Lionel had had a new house built for his young
family.

“So little by little I started to
think about going home. When my mother
heard how well I was doing in real estate, she wanted me to come back to Indiana and work for her firm, Eastridge Properties. She said Mr. Card—her boss for the past twenty years—would be happy to
hire me. I started to long for the ties
that bind, for a place where memory ran deep, for love that was something solid and
taken for granted. I started to long for
home.

“In August of 1958, Mr. Card
called me up. He was looking to expand
and needed more capital. He offered me,
not a job, but a partnership, if I would invest the money I’d made in California. I agreed to the offer, and that’s how I came
back to Indiana and saw Lionel
again, and Mary, and David, and that’s why I was here when the famous events
took place in the next few months.

“But what I’m realizing is that I
can’t tell you that story yet, because there’s something else you need to know,
even though I didn’t know it at the time. It’s a story I didn’t learn myself until years later, and maybe I didn’t
understand it fully until tonight.”